I only remember Beatles, Doors, Pink Floyd ( and the like)albums which I already had on LP, loads of classical which really didn’t interest me at the time and shit like what me dodgy uncle Ernie would like to play - Ray Coniff and val do knee gan sorts. Never found a copy of chairs missing or bollocks so flogged it.

Seems like making some more contemporary software would be a good business proposition.

It’s expensive. Vinyl discs are pressed. CDs are injection moulded then metallised. Each process takes a few seconds. Tapes, however, have to be pretty much individually recorded end-to-end. Industrial recorders can record them faster than the replay speed, but not hugely faster. So production volumes tend to be small. The industrial machines are even more pricey than the domestic ones and since they have a load of moving parts they need a good deal of maintenance. The heads also wear. I suspect that if anyone was to take this on they’d have to aim for low volume and high prices.

R2R represents the ultimate in hifi experience - it’s inconvenient, fragile, fiddly to set up, has limited software, and at any minute there is the threat of tape getting chewed up and fifty year old copies becoming worthless in an instant.

The time for a new high end tape format was probably when mass production of VHS machines & software was at it’s peak although I don’t what, if any, technical challenges would have been presented by applying the rotating head technology to high quality audio.